[This review was published in the Fall/Winter issue of The Journal of Social, Political and
Economic Studies, pp. 458-463.]

The Roots of American
Order

Russell Kirk

Washington,
D.C.:
Regnery Gateway

Beyond the Dreams of
Avarice

Russell Kirk

Peru,
Illinois: Sherwood Sugden &
Company

These are
two very different books, both of them excellent, by a thinker who shares with
few others the top rank in the conservative intellectual renaissance that has
occurred since World War II.

Beyond the Dreams of Avarice is a
gathering-together of essays on a variety of topics written by Kirk in the
1950s and originally published in such journals as Commonweal, Sewanee Review,
The Freeman, the Wall Street Journal, and Yale
Review.Despite the essays’ being
almost forty years old, they speak to us with as fresh a voice as if they were
written yesterday.Approximately half
have to do with the American scene, half with Britain.

All of it
is vintage Kirk.No doubt he could tell
us of some nuances in his intellectual migration, but he has had a grasp on
what he calls “the permanent things” for so long that his life’s work bears an
unusual consistency, bringing an Olympian critique to bear, in the most
readable and eloquent of styles, over a period of several decades.

The essays
deal with events and personalities that grow, if anything, more interesting
with age.He tells, for example, of the
great disillusionment that occurred among the socialists of Britain
after a few short years of the Atlee government’s confronting reality.I recall, from my work preparing my book on
socialist thought, what an impression that failure made on European socialism,
and even on American “liberal” thinking, piercing what had theretofore been
utopian expectations.So it is like
visiting an old friend to read about Kirk’s first-hand observations of it,
written shortly after the event.

I had not
been familiar with the writings of Orestes Brownson, who started out as a
socialist and an atheist, but underwent a conversion to Catholicism in his
early forties.If Kirk’s judgment is to
be credited, Brownson deserves a careful reading.

Nor had I
been aware of the poetry of Roy Campbell.I like a book I can learn from, and that will send me scurrying to still
other books as though a bloodhound on a trail.There is intellectual adventure in that.

In these
brief comments, I will not be giving Beyond
the Dreams of Avarice the full attention it deserves.That is because I wish to devote the majority
of my review to The Roots of American
Order, which is just as readable, eloquent and interesting, but which adds
to those qualities the monumental intellectual task of reviewing the entirety
of the history of Western civilization to select and discuss the events,
movements, ideas and personalities that Kirk understands to have most laid the
foundation for American society.

This is a
book, first published in 1974 and now reissued with an excellent epilogue by
Frank Shakespeare, that can serve as the primer for those, if there are many
left in today’s culture, who aspire to an “educated” status.It gives precisely what most young students
of history want, but what many say standard courses don’t give: a review that
stresses what is most important, without becoming bogged down in excessive
“dates and detail.”

In academia
recently, there has been a great deal of debate over what should go into “the
canon,” i.e., into the list of books
that should be presented as part of a general education.Should many of the old classics be relegated
to the dustbin of the past and supplanted by works from Latin
America, Asia and Africa?In that context, those of us who wish our
children well grounded in Western civilization first and foremost may be caught
asking ourselves “now let’s see, what precisely are the more important works of the West?” Kirk necessarily addressed this question as he
prepared his book; and he has provided at least a partial answer.There are certainly other parts of the
Western heritage to be brought in that he has either not mentioned or to which
he has had to give short shrift; but the things he does mention are clearly candidates to be included.

From all
that I have just said, it is apparent that I am of quite friendly disposition
toward Kirk and his scholarship.This
is, however, a journal of ideas, in which we seek to take seriously the content
of ideas, and in that context we owe it to Kirk as a serious thinker to come to
grips with his ideas and not simply to pass them along, even with commendation,
without a searching look.I will devote
the rest of this review to such a discussion.Necessarily, I have chosen for examination those about which my own mind
has led me to different conclusions, since it is as to them that I have
something to add.

1.Kirk’s Opposition to “Ideology”

In common
with a good many conservatives of the traditionalist school, Kirk opposes
“ideology,” which he defines as “abstract ideas not founded in historical
experience.”As so defined, the word
points to the “rationalistic fallacy” and human pretension that lie behind the
gigantic systems of ideas that, especially in the modern age, compete with each
other over social programs and worldviews about life.It was “defecated rationality” that made an
aberration of the Enlightenment, that warped Bentham’s views of the world, that
carried classical liberalism afield, and that has made the world Left such a
vehicle for hubris since the early
nineteenth century.

Traditionalist
conservatives don’t seem to realize it, but this is not unlike the way in which
Ayn Rand saw what she was doing.That
philosopher, magnificent as to many things, was convinced that her perceptions
were products of pure reason, strictly deductive inferences from the nature of
“man qua man.”To Rand, the competing
understandings were products of irrationality.I hold her in high esteem for many things, just as I do the
traditionalist conservatives, but just the same it has always seemed to me that
the world of intellect is much more complicated than that.There are giant systems of thought that serve
to “mediate” reality for human beings, because the complex reality of life
cannot be grasped in the absence of such mediation.Each of those mental systems has arisen as a
human enterprise, with its own vast stock of experiences and perceptions (and,
not coincidentally, its own sociology reflecting the interests it serves).Take, say, the socialist worldview as found
in Lassalle, that millions of people are entrapped by life and are exploited by
the strong, calling into play the need for the state as a liberating
mechanism.No doubt this outlook serves
the needs of the alienated leftist intellectual subculture as a weapon against
the hated bourgeoisie, and has served as the justification for the “have-nots”’
claim to be “victims” in need of help.But
it is not purely a fabrication formed out of air, separate from
experience.Those who advocate it have marshaled
their evidence and their arguments.Such
people include many who are highly intelligent and well-meaning.Is it sufficient to say, with Ayn Rand, that
they are simply “being irrational,” creatures of the dreaded “Beast of
Unreason”?Instead, their arguments must
be met head on, on the merits, with better evidence, better reasoning.

For his
part, Russell Kirk holds to a Christian cosmology.This coincides with an ability to champion
“experience” and tradition because the West for almost two thousand years
embraced that cosmology, making its elements part of its tradition.If we begin with the truth of that cosmology,
taking it as our starting place, then it follows that other cosmologies are
false images, amounting in effect to exercises in human vanity.But is it possible for a reasonable person
not to start with that premise?What if
the Christian cosmology is “put to its proof,” just as the other great systems
of mediation are?Then we see that the
proof is made by fallible human beings, often using types of evidence that are
less than convincing.It is the nature
of a secular age that for many this forms a veil between themselves and the
Truth that those who hold to the cosmology take for granted.Unless we take its ontology as established,
the Christian cosmology takes its place as another of the gigantic systems of
interpretation.Someone reading Kirk
needs to understand that, in common with all other writers, his
characterizations depend upon the acceptability of his premises.

There is a
major intellectual conflict, running over centuries, between those who, on
behalf of one view or another, base their position on ontological certainty and
those for whom the central intellectual issues are primarily epistemological.

This is not
to say that I think all systems of interpreted reality are equally valid.Relativism has been used as a debunking
mechanism to undercut ideas, institutions and acculturations by simply pointing
out that “your way is just one among many.”If that’s where the argument stops, it is insufficient.We are left to examine the merits of each
idea, institution and acculturation, based on our tools of judgment.

2.The Disagreement Within American Conservatism
Over the Interpretation of Modern History

I will not
attempt to resolve the differences here, but wish merely to clarify as best I
can the vastly differing interpretations that American “conservatives” of
varying kinds give to modern developments.

To
conservatives such as Kirk, Richard Weaver, Eric Voegelin and my good friend
Otto Scott, to name just a few, whose analyses center around one version or
another of the Christian worldview, Western civilization had a much better
grasp of reality a few centuries ago, when the human attention was focused on
God and society was structured in such a way as to reinforce that attention and
to curb the excesses of a sin-prone humanity.What is best in today’s life is whatever we have left from that earlier
patrimony.(Kirk manages to find quite a
lot that is good in his book on the roots of American order.This causes him to arrive in the end at an
optimism that runs counter to the more despairing tone that he takes in the
1991 foreword to the other book.He may
actually have made differing assessments in 1974 and 1991, but I am more
inclined to think that the exigencies of an “up-beat” theme, “the roots of
American order,” forced him at least temporarily into a sanguine assessment
that was at odds with his longer-term views.)

It is in this context that many traditionalist
Christian conservatives see the main developments of modernity, which have
involved a shattering of the medieval consensus and have moved toward a
relatively much more secular society, as destructive and decadent.The Enlightenment in particular was “reason
run amuck.”Classical liberalism,
championing a market economy, the rising middle class, individual freedom,
limited government and religious toleration, including the separation of church
and state, has formed the basis of much of what we call “conservatism” in the
United States in the twentieth century; but it is important to note that to the
thinkers I have been talking about classical liberalism has been part of the problem.Accordingly, Russell Kirk is prone to see the
roots of what is best in America
outside, not within, the tradition typified by Jefferson, or Paine, of (in England)
Bentham.

Where they
form common ground with classical liberals is in these two conservatisms’
mutual condemnation of the Left (and of fascism while it was an issue).But despite this commonality, the
traditionalist conservatives consider the Left an extension of the secular
rationalism that earlier formed classical liberalism.Individualistic ideology and socialist
ideology are branches, they hold, of the same tree.The latter may be more virulent and therefore
deserving of more forceful condemnation, but the secular materialism of the
bourgeoisie is only marginally preferable, if at all.This comes through clearly in all of Kirk’s
writing, but perhaps the most succinct statement of it is in Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences.

Compare this worldview with that of a
classical liberal, whom in today’s parlance we know as a “limited government,
free market conservative.”The thinkers
who led this school saw Europe and America’s breaking out of the Middle Ages as
a great good, a throwing off of shackles: social hierarchy was broken down and
titles of nobility were ended, opening the way for humanity at large to take
part; established religions were denied their special place and the individual
came to be sustained in the free exercise of religion; the mercantilist state
was replaced by a constitutionally constrained government and a market economy;
kings were replaced by republics; the franchise was extended over time to
include all adults; revelation and faith gave way to empirical science.

To this
view, the Enlightenment was the culmination of a great progressive tendency
that had long been at work shattering the closed system of medieval Europe.None of these thinkers would defend the
excesses of the French Revolution, but such horrors were to classical liberals
the effusions of the mob, not, as Edmund Burke saw them in his Reflections on the Revolution in France,
the logical fruits of a move away from status and hierarchy.

Classical
liberals have seen it as a great tragedy that, beginning with the Romantic
Movement in early nineteenth century Europe, an
intelligentsia arose that felt a profound hatred against precisely the
Enlightenment, the bourgeoisie, and classical liberalism.

To the
classical liberal, these products of anti-bourgeois alienation are in no valid
sense an extension of classical liberalism, but have been enemies from the
beginning.True, they are parts of the
West’s intellectual, social, political history since the break-up of the
medieval consensus; but that makes them “branches off the same tree” only to
someone who gives little weight to their differences.

Thus, to
the classical liberal there is a tripartite division in modern social thought:
the ideas associated with the hegemony of medievalism, the philosophy of an
open society championed by classical liberalism, and the varied collectivist
products of the “alienation of the intellectual” that have come into being as
the intelligentsia has allied itself with an assortment of unassimilated or
disaffected groups.This tripartite
division differs markedly from the traditional religious conservative’s
perception of a two-way division between the earlier God-centered society, on
the one hand, and the various expressions of the hubris of, as Kirk calls it,
modern “defecated rationality,” on the other.